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Running Girl by Simon Mason

Garvie Smith is bored, lazy, taciturn, and lacking in
ambition. He’s also ridiculously clever, rather good-looking, and popular with
his classmates. In the run up to his GCSEs his two main hobbies of lying on his
bed staring at the ceiling and hanging out in the park with his mates are
interrupted by the murder of Chloe Dow. Chloe and Garvie went to school
together and even went out for a while, so the tragedy is very close to home.
Garvie’s sharp brain is stimulated into action as he tries to unravel the clues
and get to the truth behind her murder.

I really enjoyed all the characters in Running Girl. Garvie has a touch of the Sherlock about him; they’re
flawed but brilliant, observant, and have a capacity for deep thought. Garvie
is fascinated by imaginary
numbers and spends a fair amount of time dwelling on their properties. I’m
still trying to get my head around them, but they help Garvie make sense of the
trail of evidence he discovers. He’s got a good group of mates to help him out,
even if his mum does think they’re a bad influence. I dragged my mind back more
years than I care to mention and to me they seemed pretty normal for the most
part; drinking and smoking up the rec is nothing new!

Garvie’s mum is lovely though, she just wants the best for
him. It’s obvious that she’s worried about him and is considering relocating to
Barbados, where she grew up, to keep him out of trouble. There’s a very touching
moment near the end of the book when Garvie finally understands how his mum’s
been feeling. The other adult Garvie interacts with the most is D.I. Singh, the
lead detective on the Dow case. Singh is a bit uptight and very focused,
qualities that don’t make you many friends. He is dedicated to doing the best
job he can, which does not include babysitting a sixteen-year-old amateur
detective getting under his feet and into sticky situations. Still, despite a
rocky start I think there’s some grudging and mutual respect between Garvie and
D.I. Singh by the end.

The whodunit aspect is very good and a bit tricky to work
out. Although Garvie identifies clues early on, the significance of them is
slower to emerge. There are a few dead ends and red herrings to keep us on our
toes as well as some properly creepy characters and dangerous situations for
Garvie to deal with. The murder is horribly real too, I don’t mean gruesome but
rather it is something that could happen in any community – there’s nothing
outlandish or sensationalist added.

I think Running Girl
is an excellent book. Garvie Smith is wonderful, even if his world-weariness
made me want to weep at times. Such ennui at such a young age seems shocking
from my oh so very grown-up perspective, but after a little soul-searching I’m reminded of
how impossible it is to be sixteen. I desperately hope there’s another Garvie
Smith mystery in the pipeline because I want to know what he does next.

Running Girl is
available now in Hardback from David Fickling Books. Many thanks to Random
House Kids for my eBook copy, via Netgalley.

The story of Lizzie Borden has a whiff of folklore about it, it feels hazy to me, apocryphal perhaps, something half known and uncertain like Washington and the cherry tree or the ride of Paul Revere. Shamefully, I had to Google both the latter two examples to double check they were the events I thought I was referring to. I choose them deliberately though - is it my Englishness that makes these events fuzzy to me? Do these stories live in the American psyche the way Magna Carta, Henry VIII and his six wives, and Jack the Ripper (to select three almost at random) live in mine?
I remember a book we stocked when I was a very young bookseller at Waterstones in Watford that looked at the psychology of children who murder their parents. The copy on the back of the book talked of Lizzie Borden. I remember half wondering about the case, then shelving the book away and moving onto the next armful. But it stuck in my m…

My nieces and nephews and I have a monthly book club, called Book Chase (although it sometimes gains an extra 's' to become Book Chasse). The rules are simple: we all bring something we've read during the last month, talk about it to each other, and eat snacks. We live tweet each meeting with the hashtag BookChase. Sometimes, when we remember, we Storify all the tweets too. This month, we remembered!